Anthony Albanese’s coffee diplomacy can’t remove shadow of domestic politics at Cop31

Being cynical comes easy at a UN climate summit, but there was a faint glimmer of something else on the face of the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese. Pride.

Standing to face journalists at his only press conference here at Cop31 in Antalya on Thursday, Albanese was flanked by seven leaders from the Pacific.

He said he was privileged to be standing with them and proud of what Australia was doing to help them access funding to deal with the climate crisis.

Politicians say this kind if thing all the time, but this felt believable. Albanese was beaming.

Colloquially known as Albo, he flew into Cop31 on Wednesday morning as one of more than 90,000 delegates to visit this UN and flew out on Friday afternoon.

With his climate change minister Chris Bowen in the position of president of negotiations, Albanese became a significant figure in the talks, speaking at high-level meetings over a two-and-a-half day visit that was a perfect encapsulation of the contradictions that, for now, have to exist together in climate diplomacy.

That contradiction is that a country like Australia can advocate for climate action while still being a major fossil fuel producer. The problems came when Albanese failed to name the central problem – fossil fuels.

His big public moment came only a few hours after stepping off the plane with a travelling press pack and a ready handshake for the Turkish president, Recep Erdoğan, and the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

In the vast plenary hall here, Guterres was typically bold in the conference opening, saying as heat records were being shattered, “fossil fuel interests keep making a killing … while killing our planet”.

But then came the perfectly timed kicker, saying developed countries “cannot keep expanding fossil fuel production while claiming to be committed to 1.5 degrees”.

Perfectly timed because Albanese was next on stage – the leader of one such developing country that is the second largest exporter of thermal coal, the largest exporter of coal for steelmaking and that is also responsible for a fifth of seaborne LNG.

This was the “critical decade” Albanese said, and he was “proud to be a leader on climate action.”

A report released here from groups Germanwatch and New Climate Institute disagreed. For its policies and efforts to mitigate climate change, Australia was ranked as a “very low” performer.

Australia has promised to raise the plight of its Pacific neighbours at this Cop, and Albanese and his energy minister, Chris Bowen, have done it regularly in speeches and statements.

During his address, Albanese read a message from 13-year-old Melelusi Sokotia, a student in the low-lying Pacific nation of Tuvalu, who wrote they had a “simple dream” to grow up safely on the island.

Australia was “proud to be here fighting for the interests of our Pacific family,” Albanese said and the Pacific was “pleading for us” to take action.

‘One of the most important events I’ve ever been to’

But action on what? As Guterres had said, the answer was to move away from producing and burning fossil fuels, but the two f-words never left Albanese’s lips.

An awkward omission indeed that Albanese later defended by saying you could “pick out any number of things that weren’t in what was a short speech”.

Perhaps the refusal to name the heart of the problem is down to the political landscape in Australia, where a climate science-denying far-right populist party, One Nation, is level in the polls with Albanese’s Labor, and the official opposition centre-right Liberal party wants to scrap net zero climate goals.

Although it is a challenge faced by leaders of all developed nations, Albanese’s dilemma is particularly acute.

“I think the PM has to walk a fine line between the domestic politics of climate change that’s getting harder, and the urgent need for strong action,” Matt Kean, the chair of Australia’s Climate Change Authority, told the Guardian. “And he is doing it successfully.”

Kean should know. He was a treasurer and energy minister in the Liberal government of New South Wales, and has been at the sharp end of the politics of climate change.

His successes included an event of potential consequence – a breakfast bringing major investors including a large Canadian pension fund, a Japanese investment bank and various others into the same room as Australian renewables companies.

“It was one of the most consequential and important events I’ve ever been to at these conferences,” said Kean.

“Australia gathered in a room some of the biggest capital allocators in the world with Australian renewables developers. It was unbelievable for [Albanese] to use his position to drive investment. I think it was incredibly impactful.”

There is a push in Antalya for countries such as Australia to draw up roadmaps to transition away from fossil fuels. It’s a central issue that Bowen and Albanese have steered clear of.

But what has been noticed is that Albanese is consistently speaking on climate change and turning up – from the Pacific Island Forum, to a pre-COP summit in Fiji and now Cop 31. He led a session to promote the Pacific Resilience Facility – a funding arm established with A$100m (US$68m) that will be used to help the region deal with climate impacts.

Tuvalu climate change minister, Dr Maina Talia, told the Guardian that Albanese had seen the impacts of rising sea levels at the pre-Cop visit to his island, and seen work to reclaim eight hectares of land that was supported by Australia.

“I look at [the Australian] prime minister’s presence here and it shows a lot of concern for the Pacific. He is concerned for his fellow neighbouring countries. For me his presence means a lot to us. We look to Australia as a big brother.”

Much of the Cop coverage back in Australia has had a narrow focus on cost, including one segment from a News Corp outlet that complained free coffee at the Australian pavilion was costing the taxpayer A$32,000. That’s about one tenth of one Australian cent for every Australian, if we’re counting.

The former Australian Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who is in Antalya as president of the International Hydropower Association, said the News Corp coverage was “seriously bizarre, even by their standards”.

“Climate and energy policy should be determined by engineering and economics, not ideology and idiocy which is what we’re seeing from One Nation and, sadly, from the Liberal party at present,” he said.

“Despite the evidence of global warming being manifest and despite renewables actually being cheaper, we’ve still got this culture war going on.